For many years, people have recognized the health benefits of exercising on a regular basis. As a result, a whole industry dedicated to physical fitness and exercise was created and has grown into a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Areas of this industry, which includes personal trainers, fitness clubs, nutrition based products, exercise gear and fitness competitions, tend to complement each other and work hand in hand with each other to help individuals achieve an effective physical fitness regimen. For example, a large number of fitness clubs employ nutritionists and personal trainers that are readily available to advise their fitness club members, wherein the basic services that these personal trainers perform are primarily three fold. First, the trainers develop an exercise regime tailored to individual clients and advise their clients on how to safely and effectively exercise. Second, the trainers track the exercise performance of the client over the duration of the training period and analyze the client's exercise performance data to identify where the client is or is not showing improvements. The trainer may then adjust the exercise regime of the client to maximize the benefit to the client. Third, the trainer provides motivation to their client, which ultimately helps the client to maintain their exercise regime. This not only aids the client in maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but also helps the fitness club retain their membership.
Unfortunately however, because personal trainers are expensive to employ, most fitness clubs only have one or two trainers on staff to assist hundreds of members and as such, the on-staff trainers are typically not able to spend a significant amount of time with each individual member. Accordingly, in order for the member to obtain the full benefit of their club membership, the member must hire the trainer outside of their health club membership or they must analyze their performance and adjust their exercise regime using other methods. While there are systems currently available that provide some data tracking services and motivational tools for exercise, these systems include several undesirable characteristics. One such characteristic involves the availability and cost of the system. For example, current systems are not readily available to the majority of commercial gyms or to the individual because they are expensive and require a high capital investment. Another such characteristic involves the compatibility between the existing systems and the exercise equipment. For example, the ability of the existing systems to connect to a typical workout machine is limited due to communication and functional issues between the tracking system and the exercise machine, as well as due to the layout of the fitness club. Still yet another undesirable characteristic involves the lack of functionality of the existing systems and its ease of use. For example, one such system employs a computerized kiosk that requires the user of the exercise equipment to manually input their work out data. Whereas another such system employs the use of an electronic key that can only interact with a specific line of exercise equipment. Thus, if the user were to use exercise equipment that was not able to interface with the electronic key, the user would need to input their exercise data manually using a computerized kiosk.
Unfortunately, all of the existing systems require the user of the exercise equipment to either use some unique device to interface with a specific machine or to manually interact with a stand-alone computer terminal where the data being entered is prone to data entry errors and/or misuse.